The third messenger of the morning smelled like river mud and charred pine.

  He knelt on the polished floor of the Main Hall. He was shivering. A nasty burn tracked up the left sleeve of his outer disciple uniform, the fabric melted directly into his skin.

  Bai Qian didn't look at his face. She looked at the burn. The edges were blistered white.

  "Report," she said. Her voice was the temperature of the stone floor.

  "The southern river barges," the messenger swallowed, his throat clicking loudly in the vast, echoing hall. "They didn't even demand a toll, Sect Master. The Iron Blood Vanguard waited until the grain was loaded at the docks. Then they fired the fire-oil arrows. Three barges. Six months of winter rations. Gone."

  Bai Qian picked up a red-ink brush. She drew a single, sharp line through a column on the heavy bamboo ledger resting on her desk.

  "Casualties?"

  "Four dockhands dead. Two guards." The messenger kept his forehead pressed to the floor. "The Vanguard left a flag planted in the ashes."

  Bai Qian set the brush down. The ink was drying too fast in the cold air. It made the bristles stiff.

  "Go to the Medical Hall," she instructed. "Tell Elder Hua to use the second-tier salve on that arm."

  The boy scrambled backward and fled, leaving a faint trail of wet mud and ash on the ironwood.

  Bai Qian stared at the red line on the ledger. It was a simple stroke of ink, but it represented three thousand outer disciples who were going to miss dinner by the end of the month.

  A heavy, wet cough broke the silence.

  Elder Shen Mu sat in the secondary chair to her right. He looked terrible. His skin had taken on the waxy, translucent quality of old parchment. The stress-induced meridian misfire from five days ago was still chewing at his foundation. He leaned heavily on a dark wood cane.

  "The western passes were sealed yesterday," Shen Mu rasped. Every breath sounded like paper tearing. "The southern river is burning today. Our external supply lines are dead. We are an island, Sect Master."

  Bai Qian didn't look at him. She turned the page of the ledger. "We have internal reserves. The mountain terraces yield enough root vegetables to stretch the remaining grain."

  "Stretch." Shen Mu let out a dry, rattling laugh. It ended in another cough. "You want to feed three thousand martial artists on half-rations of radishes. Do you know what happens to a cultivator's foundation when caloric intake drops below their qi expenditure? They cannibalize their own muscles."

  He leaned forward. The wood of his cane creaked.

  "Mo Zheng gave us two months. We will starve in four weeks." Shen Mu’s bloodshot eyes bored into the side of her face. "This is not a tournament, Bai Qian. You cannot put your pet scholar on a stage to take a nap while the sect starves. Mo Zheng isn't fighting us. He is simply closing the box."

  He wasn't talking about the grain. He was talking about the marriage. He was talking about the anomaly currently sitting in the Eastern Pavilion.

  Surrender the husband. Bow to the Iron Blood banner. Save the sect. The ultimatum hovered in the cold air between them, entirely unspoken.

  Bai Qian picked up a black-ink brush. She began writing a rationing order.

  "Outer disciples will move to two meals a day," she said flatly. "Inner sect meat rations are suspended. Inform the pavilion masters."

  Shen Mu stared at her. His jaw worked, grinding against his own teeth. He wanted to scream. He wanted to shatter the desk. But he had seen what Mo Zheng did to the Ghost-Faced Wyrm in this very courtyard. He knew exactly what awaited them if the siege held.

  He didn't argue. He stood up, leaning heavily on his cane, and limped out of the hall.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Bai Qian kept writing until the heavy doors groaned shut.

  She stopped. The brush hovered over the parchment.

  She looked at her left hand. The fingers were trembling. Just a microscopic vibration in the tendons.

  An economic siege. It was the most cowardly, effective tactic in regional warfare. You didn't need to defeat a Saint Peak cultivator if you simply starved the people she was sworn to protect. Mo Zheng was leveraging the sheer weight of his Celestial-tier authority to blockade an entire mountain range without drawing a sword.

  She thought about the red line on the ledger. She thought about the pulverized jade in the courtyard.

  She thought about File Thirteen, sitting empty in her drawer.

  She pressed her left hand flat against the desk until the trembling stopped. Then, she dipped her brush and kept writing.

  The boiled ox-hide patch on the bottom of Wei Tian’s left shoe was holding up exceptionally well.

  He sat on the flat gray rock beneath the gnarled pine tree in the Eastern Pavilion's courtyard. The afternoon sun was weak, filtered through high, thin clouds. The wind carried a bitter edge.

  He rested his right ankle on his left knee. He tapped the ox-hide patch with his finger. Solid. Xiao Mei was a terrible spy, but her leatherwork was structurally sound.

  He opened his blue-covered book.

  He was halfway through a chapter detailing the collapse of the Fifth Harmonic Empire. They had built a machine to harvest the kinetic energy of dying stars, and fundamentally misunderstood the necessary thermal shielding. It was a fascinating case study in hubris and poor insulation.

  Footsteps approached on the dirt path. They were fast, heavy, and lacked any sort of rhythmic discipline.

  Xiao Mei practically kicked the courtyard gate open.

  She carried a small, unvarnished wooden tray. She was panting, her silver-trimmed robes dusty at the hem. She marched over to the pine tree and shoved the tray toward him.

  "Lunch," she snapped. Her voice was an octave higher than usual.

  Wei Tian looked at the tray.

  There was a single chipped bowl. Inside sat a modest mound of plain white rice.

  He looked at Xiao Mei. He looked back at the tray.

  "Where is the pickled radish?" Wei Tian asked.

  Xiao Mei stared at him. Her eyes were wide, rimmed with red. The ambient qi in her Sage Layer 6 foundation was vibrating erratically, a clear symptom of acute psychological distress.

  "They burned the boats," she blurted out.

  "Who burned whose boats?"

  "The Iron Blood Sect! Mo Zheng's vanguard." Xiao Mei waved her free hand frantically toward the southern horizon. "They blockaded the western passes and burned the grain barges on the river. We have no food coming in. The Sect Master just issued a mountain-wide rationing decree. Inner disciples get no meat. Outer disciples get two bowls of rice a day."

  Wei Tian looked at the plain rice.

  He ran the data through his internal framework. The Threshold.

  Mo Zheng had activated an economic strangulation tactic. A siege.

  Was a throat currently being cut? No. Was the realm-fabric tearing? No. It was a logistical disruption. It was a supply chain failure engineered by a local warlord to force a political concession. Mortals and low-level cultivators were obsessed with supply chains. It was how they measured power.

  Starvation took weeks. Dehydration took days. Currently, nobody was dying. They were just hungry and frightened.

  Wei Tian categorized the entire situation as 'administrative delay.' It sat comfortably miles below his Threshold of intervention.

  "Did they burn the archives?" Wei Tian asked.

  Xiao Mei stopped waving her hand. She blinked. "What? No. Why would they burn the archives?"

  "Then it's a kitchen problem," Wei Tian said.

  He picked up the bowl. He picked up his cheap bamboo chopsticks.

  Xiao Mei’s mouth fell open. She looked like she wanted to physically strike him. The entire sect was plunging into a collective panic. Disciples were hoarding pills. Elders were hoarding weapons. The shadow of a Celestial Initiate was suffocating the mountain.

  And the Sect Master's husband was mildly disappointed by his lunch menu.

  "We are going to starve," Xiao Mei whispered. The anger drained out of her, leaving only raw, hollow terror. "If the Sect Master doesn't surrender to Mo Zheng, we are all going to starve to death on this rock."

  Wei Tian took a bite of the plain rice. It was cold. It definitely needed the radish. The acidity would have balanced the starch perfectly.

  He chewed slowly. Swallowed.

  "A man who burns grain is usually a man who is afraid of a fair fight," Wei Tian observed, staring out at the distant, jagged peaks. His voice was a flat, lazy drawl. "Or he is taking orders from someone who prefers quiet deaths."

  Xiao Mei hugged her empty tray to her chest. "He killed a Saint-tier monster with his bare hands. He's not afraid of anything."

  Wei Tian didn't answer. He took another bite of rice.

  He thought about the hand seal Mo Zheng had used in the valley. The Seventh Harmonic closure. A cosmic key placed in the hands of a local warlord.

  Someone was turning the dial. Someone wanted the White Jade Sect broken, but they were using blunt, mundane instruments to do it. An economic siege was slow. It was methodical. It was the tactic of a watcher running an experiment, waiting to see what the subjects did under sustained pressure.

  If you want to see a rat move, Wei Tian thought, picking a stray husk out of his bowl, you flood the maze.

  "Tell the kitchen auntie I will accept boiled greens if the radish is truly gone," Wei Tian said.

  Xiao Mei let out a sound that was half-sob, half-growl. She turned and stomped away, her footsteps kicking up angry little clouds of dust on the path.

  Wei Tian finished the rice. He set the empty bowl on the rock beside him.

  He picked up his book. He found his dried leaf. He began reading the next paragraph about thermal shielding.

  The wind picked up, howling through the pines, carrying the distant, frantic shouts of three thousand cultivators realizing they were trapped in a cage.

  Wei Tian turned a page.

  It wasn't his cage. Not yet.